"There is a checklist of what a NM has to do. Basically, he needs a GPG
key signed by a developer, he has to answer some Philosophy and
Procedures questions and in the Tasks and Skills test he has to show
that he has the experience to be a good Debian developer.

You should advocate someone when you think that he is ready to be a
developer -- when he has the required skills and when he has been
involved with the project for some time. Just ask yourself if you want
to see him in Debian -- if you think he should be a Debian developer
then go ahead and recommend him.

The exact steps are like this: you agree with a prospective developer to
recommend him and he signs up. Then you have to go to this site, click
on his name in the listing of applicants, go to the "advocate this
application" page, put in your Debian login and press the 'submit'
button. You will then receive an e-mail with an auth key which you have
to return GPG/PGP signed. When this is done, the prospective developer
will get an AM assigned who goes through the NM steps with him."

Count the "he"s. I get 13. This doesn't seem to be, based on the stuff
I've been flicking through, particularly unusual. And people wonder why
women find debian unfriendly to them! It's certainly discouraging to me.

I'm sure that this is not _intended_ to be unfriendly, or even sexist.
Maybe the people who wrote it, don't even realise why using such
language is a problem. But it can't be that hard to automatically go
through the webpages, search for occurances of "he" and change them into
"she/he", and change "him" into "him/her" etc. Does anyone on this
mailing list doubt that such things do matter?

What can we do to get this sort of thing fixed? Preferably quickly :)
I am happy to write to people personally and ask that they fix up such
language when I see it, especially if anyone can suggest who to write
to. But maybe there is a better way to approach the problem.